Free Spurious by Lars Iyer Page A

thinks I am so disgusting. I have no sense of food, he says, I could be eating anything. For a long time, he remembers, I lived only on discounted sandwiches from Boots, 75p a packet.
    He remembers me telling him of my circumambulations of town in search of discounted sandwiches. My great circumambulations, W. says, taking in every possible shop that sold stale, discounted sandwiches.
    For a long time, W. remembers, I ate only gingerbread men, five a day. I would buy a packet of five stale gingerbread men from the discount bakery and a fourpack of own-branded supermarket lager from Kwik Save, the very worst.
    ‘No wonder you were always ill’, W. says. ‘No wonder you were always complaining about your stomach’. Of course, I was poor then, W. concedes, but that was no excuse.
    Gluttony has always appalled W., who has a small and delicate appetite. He always undertakes special measures when I come to visit him, to make sure there’s enough food in the house. It was part of the reason he bought his new fridge, W, says.—‘You’re greedy, greedy!’
    When I text from the airport to tell him I’ve arrived, he opens a bottle of Chablis or Cava and puts the glasses on the table, and then unwraps a block of Emmenthal and brings out his sliced meats, along with olive oil and relishes. He’ll offer bread, which he will have made himself, and slices of smoked salmon.
    ‘Only the best!’, says W. ‘Only the best for my friends!’ Food’s a gift, W. says, the greatest of gifts, which I desecrate every time I visit him.
    A little later.—‘Food is for the other’, W. announces. ‘It’s a gift’. He lays out slices of Emmenthal and cold meat.—‘You’re the other’, he says, ‘so I have to feed you’. From your own mouth?—‘That’s what Levinas says’. W. opens his mouth. – ‘Do you want some? Do you?’
    Sometimes, I remind him, W. likes to explain things about me to other people like an indulgent mother.—‘The thing about Lars is …’, he’ll begin. Or: ‘What you have to understand about Lars is …’ And best of all, when he’s feeling very tender, ‘What I love about Lars is …’ Is that it, then?, I ask W., do you love me?—‘Yes, I love you’, says W. ‘You see, I can talk about love. I can express my feelings. Not like you’.
    I keep a mental list of W.’s favourite questions, which he constantly asks me so as to ask himself.—‘At what point did you realise that you would amount to nothing?’; ‘When was it that you first became aware you would be nothing but a failure?’; ‘When you look back at your life, what do you see?’; ‘How is it that you know what greatness is, and that you will never, ever reach it?’
    ‘What does it mean to you that your life has amounted to nothing?, W. asks me with great seriousness. And then, ‘Why have your friends never made you greater?’ This is W.’s great fantasy, he admits: a group of friends who could make one another think. Do I make him think?, I ask him.—‘No! The opposite! You’re an idiot!’
    Then: ‘What do you consider to be your greatest weakness?’ W. answers for me: ‘Never having come to terms with your lack of ability. Because you haven’t, have you? Have you?’
    I ask him what is most distorted about his understanding of the world.—‘I have this fantasy of being part of a community, and this prevents my individual action’. And then, dolefully, ‘I don’t work hard enough’. But he works night and day, I tell him.—‘Oh compared to you, I work. Compared to you, we’re all busy’.
    ‘What time did you get up to work this morning?’, says W. Five.—‘I was up at four. At four!’ , W. says. But he laments the fact that he watches television in the evenings. He used to work in the evenings, he says. In fact, he worked all the time. A room with a bed and a desk and his books, that’s all.—‘That was my peak’, he says. ‘When are you going to peak? Are you peaking now? Is this